Douchebags of the Week (Sept. 5-11)
While this is probably not an actual photograph of the douchebag-in-question, we’re relatively confident that Mark Whicker and the editors at the Orange Country Register can’t object to our laziness in publishing it as such since it was one of the results that came up when we did a Google Image search for the sports columnist. Who has time for considering such things when your only concern is just filling space—regardless of how ill-conceived the ideas are?
Last Monday, Whicker took on a whole new angle to the incredible developments in the case of Jaycee Lee Dugard, who was abducted in 1991 and resurfaced some 18 years later. If anything exemplifies a clear case of a newspaper columnist “phoning it in,” then Whicker’s decision to exploit the horrific story as an excuse to bullet-point whatever random collection of sports stories came to mind certainly takes the cake.
It’s shocking that after more than two decades in the business, Whicker didn’t have the common sense to realize how terribly inappropriate and shameless this would strike every rational person as being; it’s even worse that none of the editors above him had the decency or respect for their audience to tell the columnist to go back to his desk and do some real work.
Naturally, the reaction was swift and universal condemnation. Deadspin called it “the single worst piece of sports journalism ever committed to the page.” A reaction piece on The Huffington Post was titled, “Orange County Register Publishes The Single Most Tasteless Sports Column In The History Of Written Language.” And when Michael David Smith at AOL Fanhouse spoke to Whicker about the feedback, the writer claimed he was “surprised by the angry tone of the reaction“—which he also called “extreme.”
And perhaps you couldn’t blame Whicker for thinking the idea wasn’t going to cause the shitstorm that it did—because he used the same concept in the same year Dugard went missing for a column attempting to tell Terry Anderson, the longest-held American hostage in Lebanon during that country’s 15-year long civil war, about the notable sports events that he’d missed.
Of course, Whicker didn’t recall any negative feedback to that column and blamed the reaction on the “speed the enormity of the Internet”:
“I’m a little saddened by the tone of some of the responses because I think it says a lot about what’s out there in computer-land,” Whicker said. “I’ve had some e-mailers say, ‘Why don’t you write about 9/11 while you’re at it?’ Another person said, ‘Why don’t you write about the Holocaust next?’ I think that’s a really obscene thing to say.”
Is it really? As the best satire has a way of doing, there was an awful lot of truth to the imagined line-by-line response Dugard would have had to the piece:
How long before she fully digests the world she re-enters? How difficult to adjust to such cataclysmic change?
The hardest part for me in this trying and nightmarish time is not knowing what happened in sports in the last 18 years. It’s been nearly as tough to deal with as all the constant rapes.
While we can certainly understand that your editors here at LOL may be joining the mob mentality that is “America at our self-aggrandizing, self-righteous, politically correct worst” as Keith Scherer said in Rob Neyer’s reaction post over at ESPN.com—right before the web site showed it’s own journalistic integrity and axed the piece.
We feel confident, however, that much like that douchebag we found on the side of the country a few weeks back, Whicker and his editors in the O.C. are emblematic of the very reasons print journalism’s health continues to suffer. While every columnist will have their occasional misfire, if newspapers continue to pump out opinions that have seemingly had little to no editorial thought given to them, who’s to blame the public for not giving any more thought to their product either?
